Starting this year SXSW is replacing the sample tracks they have provided for years with links to Soundcloud pages. While there are certainly known ways to download those samples, Soundcloud goes through considerable trouble to prevent that from happening. Since these torrents have always been about providing easier access to otherwise readily downloadable samples instead of outright piracy, this regrettably means that, if SXSW sticks with this new design, we will be unable to provide torrents in the future.

The good news:

Since this is a very recent change, we do have a partial set of sample tracks that were released for 2014. It should be on the order of 700-800 songs; however there will likely not be a Part 2. We were not expecting this change, so please be patient as we get our process updated and get a release built. We're hoping to be ready first thing next week (2/24).

So basically, SXSW has made it impossible for me to do my usual prep -- listen to 1500 tracks, decide which ones I like, and then use that list to decide which shows to attend. Without doing that prep, there's really no reason for me to attend at all, because the chance that I'm going to see something I care about drops to basically zero. I'll end up seeing 3 bands a day instead of 14. I wouldn't have bought a ticket, hotel and flight if I'd known I was going to have to go in cold.

They used to provide full torrents themselves. Then they stopped. Then they used to provide MP3s. Now they've stopped. Next year maybe they won't even bother telling us who's playing!

Meanwhile:

I guess it's time to update my scrape-sxsw.pl script to try and rip all the music from their site on my own. Anyone got a pointer to a simple, effective and functional Soundcloud downloader? Perl preferred, but anything I can run from the command line is fine.

lol jwz it takes you less to write a script to scrape all soundcloud than to write these rants. hope you love writing as I loved reading your rants since back then about X11 code :^) in Italy we have a most succesfull blog: LE http://LAMENTAZIONI.org started with tech rants ahahaah <3 datalove to the west coast dude

SXSW is an industry event.
SXSW is an industry event.
SXSW is an industry event.

It bears repeating because too many people take this attitude that you have here that it somehow should be catering to "customers." It shouldn't. This isn't Bonaroo or ACL and you are not some label agent trying to sign bands. If in anything the reason why SXSW keeps making things difficult is to limit the number of "tourists" that show up to the official events. Consider the unofficial ones.

You also have Operation Every Band and sched.org to aid in your SXSW experience.

That being said, I do wish they has a sane JSON API the way Burning Man has set up, but again, that would probably just make things too easy for the tourists.

Was your reply supposed to be helpful in any way? Because it sounds to me like you we're stroking the cheeto crumbs out of your neckbeard while saying, "herp derp, surrender, never leave the basement, never try."

So, you know, thanks for the insight that corporations exist and enjoy money.

Also -- you pinhead -- I am not a label, but perhaps you're aware of what my business does. It has a little something to do with... finding and hiring bands.

I wrote a tool in python a while back that downloads tracks from soundcloud: soundrip. I don't know why the sxswtorrent people are making such a fuss though, soundcloud exposes direct urls to mp3s through it's api.

Hey, I've gone to some effort to retrieve artist and schedule information for SXSW 2014 - it was quite a pain and I really wish they provided a decent api. I'm quite happy to share the data I have gathered in json format - contact me if you are interested.
I've created a site based on this data which allows you to play artist videos one after the other with just a couple of clicks - I'm planning to add functionality to allow the creation of custom playlists but that will likely not be ready till next week.
Any feedback etc will be much appreciated:

I've used offliberty.com in the past for (non-commercial as per TOS) downloads of Soundcloud stuff, and they have a bookmarklet for sending a URL through to them. (This isn't a functional command-line tool, yeah, I know. Hopefully it's not derp derp but a step in teh right direction.)